Relatives of Yunus Ismail, who was killed in a suicide bomb attack on Saturday, carry his coffin during a funeral in Najaf yesterday.

AFP/Baghdad


Suicide bombers attacked Shia pilgrims in Baghdad and a primary school and police station in a Shia village in north Iraq yesterday, killing at least 24 people, officials said.
The violence is at a level unseen since 2008, amid persistent fears of a relapse into the kind of intense Sunni-Shia bloodshed that peaked in 2006-2007 and killed tens of thousands of people.
A suicide bomber detonated explosives near pilgrims walking to a shrine in north Baghdad to commemorate the death of Imam Mohamed al-Jawad, the ninth Shia imam.
The blast killed at least nine people and wounded 30 others, officials said.
A bus parked near the site of the explosion had a streak of blood running from a shattered window down its side.
Pieces of human flesh hung from a roadside tree, and blood was spattered on a pavement and the underside of a bridge.
Two young boys sifted through debris at the site, where items including sandals and a policeman’s belt buckle lay in a pool of water formed when emergency personnel hosed the street down.
“We are not afraid of the explosion, we are not afraid of death,” said Hussein Haidar, a pilgrim walking to the shrine after the attack.
Even after the blast, security forces performed only cursory searches of people entering the area.
Two more suicide bombers yesterday targeted the Turkmen Shia village of Qabak in Nineveh province about 50km from the border with Syria.
The bombers detonated explosives-rigged vehicles at a police station and a primary school, killing 15 people and wounding 44, local official Abdulal Abbas said.
Ten children and five police were killed, Abbas said, adding that the school bombing collapsed the building’s roof.
“Al Qaeda terrorists... carried out the crime because we are Shias,” a weeping mother whose young son was wounded in Qabak said at a hospital in Dohuk province.
A bomb also exploded in east Baghdad yesterday, killing at least five people and wounding 14, while two blasts in the northern province of Kirkuk killed a Kurdish security forces member and wounded another.
In Iraq, almost nothing is safe from attack by militants.
They have struck highly secure targets such as prisons, and also bombed cafes, markets, mosques, football fields, weddings and funerals.
Yesterday’s blasts came a day after violence including an attack on Shia pilgrims in Baghdad and a suicide bombing at a cafe killed at least 73 people.
Among them were two journalists from the Sharqiya television channel gunned down in the northern city of Mosul.
UN envoy Nickolay Mladenov called on Iraq’s “political, religious and civil leaders to work together with the security forces” to curb the bloodshed.
“It is their responsibility to ensure that pilgrims can practise their religious duties, that schoolchildren can attend their classes, that journalists can exercise their professional duties, and that ordinary citizens can live a normal life,” Mladenov said in a statement.
British ambassador Simon Collis, meanwhile, said: “This latest example of violence against worshippers and journalists is further evidence of terrorists seeking to create division within Iraq.”